TETSUYA IIJIMA

Chosen because: Tetsuya Iijima, 53, has led Nissan's efforts to develop advanced driver assistance systems and autonomous driving technologies, starting a decade ago when he worked at Nissan Technical Center North America. In 2015 Iijima and his team developed Piloted Drive 1.0, which enables vehicles to change lanes, pass other vehicles and merge onto and off of highways by themselves. In August Nissan launched a Serena minivan in Japan with semiautonomous technology called ProPilot, the first step toward the automaker's goal of putting fully self-driving cars on the market by 2020.